Abstract: To enhance the performance of artificial bee colony algorithm, a quantum-inspired bee colony algorithm was proposed. In the proposed approach, the bees were encoded with the qubits described on the Bloch sphere. The evolutionary search was achieved by rotating the qubit about the rotation axis on the Bloch sphere. The Bloch coordinates of qubit can be obtained by measuring with the Pauli matrices, and the optimization solutions can be presented through the solution space transformation. The highlight advantages of this method are the ability to simultaneously adjust two parameters of a qubit and automatically achieve the best match between two adjustment quantities. The experimental results show that the proposed method obviously outperforms the classical one for some benchmark functions and the water flooded layer identification.

Key words: quantum computing, bee colony optimizing, Bloch sphere rotating, algorithm designing